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1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

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Wednesday, 4 May 2011

Autobiography

I pondered whether to put this in "Autobiography" or elsewhere but it is autobiographical so, although it's back at the time of my infant school days again, that's where I've put it.

Today, on a whim, instead of turning left and going to the supermarket I turned right and went down by my old primary school. I had my camera with me and I intended to take a picture of my infant school. Sadly, since last time I went that way, it has been demolished. It was damaged some years ago in an accident and has been closed ever since but I hadn't realised that they had actually demolished it. I continued down the short walk that I used to have to my home, no more than two or three minutes away.

When I got back home I decided to put down the experience as a poem. Here it is.

I close my eyes and overlay the past upon the presenttrying to be the child who once stood here;but he is gone, as is the world whose ghostpaints shadow pictures in my head of how it was.

There is an empty lot, surrounded by boards;signs that say, "Danger", "Keep Out", "No Trespassing"and a chain link fence to reinforce the messagethat this ground is forbidden now to everyone.

But this was where my first school stoodwhere in my mind the old brick building's standing yetwhere I am letting go of my mother's handand entering a world of strangeness and strangers.

This was where I was promoted from bystander to kingin the Christmas nativity, when the king got measles;and where I was the Knave of Hearts in cardboard chainswith two lines of dialogue I remember to this day.

I shake my head and walk away, cross the old railway bridgeand turn into a cul-de-sac where memory tricks meand the overlay is scarcely altered from the presentand I pause a moment, startled by the lack of change.

There, at the closed end, is the entrance to the alleythat led me back home each day from school;that was the limit of my infant explorationsand the very edge of the world in which I lived.

The alley leads me out into a world of change.The houses standing here are in the world but not my headand overlain upon the scene is just one housethat filled the whole ground where now a dozen stand.

In that house, with its gas mantle lights,with its long thin garden and separate wash house,with its high walls and fences and its guardian trees;in that house I breathed my first breath, cried my first tears.

I close my eyes and overlay the past upon the presenttrying to be the child who once stood here;but he is gone, as is the world whose ghostpaints shadow pictures in my head of how it was.

2 comments:

David Love
said...

Just thought you'd like to know. I too was a king - although we preferred to call them, with great prescience, "wise men". I had the gold; Fitzroy Osbourn and Kevin Truby were frankincense and myrrh. The only reason I had gold was because my dad was a decorator and had access to gold paint.

You know I can't remember what gift I was carrying, though I can remember the name of the kid who got measles and the lesson where we made the crowns from cut out circlets of cardboard with kid's sweets (midget gems I think they were called) glued on.